Reports & whitepapers

Global mobile operators collectively lose tens of billions of euros annually, to customer churn. The impact of churn on a mobile operator’s profitability is of consequence.

Churn impacts the operator’s financials in several ways. Firstly, operators lose the future revenue that a churned customer can provide. Secondly, all the marketing investments and resources used to acquire the customer are lost.

Operators typically spend astronomical amounts on getting customers, even though the cost of retaining an existing customer could be as much as 50 times lower than acquiring a new client. This is a vast, yet relatively unexplored and potentially profitable opportunity for mobile operators.

Systematic churn prevention requires predicting and behavioural modelling based on a vast amount of data living in several locations on the network, and gets continuously updated.

Could artificial intelligence and big data be applied in an economical way to help operators turn around their churning customers? This needs dedicated resources and investments in big data analytics and machine learning, which would be able to detect low signals and see correlations that normal rule engines or humans cannot see.

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Communications Service Providers (CSPs) are constantly faced with the twin challenges of controlling costs and the need to make constant adjustments to their networks through the introduction of new services, upgrades to existing elements and boosts to capacity and coverage.

This creates a volatile environment, in which problems with network and service assurance can result. These can have a dramatic impact on customer experience and costs, causing them to escalate rapidly.

Predictive analytics is seen by many as a solution to this problem and it is believed that it can deliver many benefits. However, the predictions that CSPs need must be drawn from a sufficient source of reliable data. Happily, CSPs have data in abundance. This rich supply of information must be collected and then converted into a form that can be processed by analytic engines to extract the intelligence it offers.

Initiatives to add Predictive Network Maintenance capabilities are an evolving field of study, particularly within the telecom domain. Learn how Polystar’s experts are striving to understand what’s important, so that they can enable CSPs to correct potential problems before they occur, particularly as the network evolves and grows.

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A common mistake in the communications service provider (CSP) market right now is to target digital transformation as the end game for the industry. The reality is that digital transformation is simply an enabling step for the far wider-reaching digital revolution which will have far greater impacts not only on the telecoms industry but on how business is done and how we live our lives.

The digital revolution is more about society than technology, although technological progress in the form of big data, cloud computing, robotics, virtualisation, artificial intelligence and augmented and virtual reality, is creating the foundation, this revolution is more about radical changes in the way and scale of value creation and how this value is perceived and consumed by the society.

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Delivering the customer centric bill
As communications service providers (CSPs) turn to customer experience as the key differentiator in increasingly competitive markets, attention has once more returned to telecoms billing. (more…)

No one has missed the telecom industry’s big hope that Big Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) will come to the rescue and improve the current level of service assurance in the service provider domain.

Service assurance systems are promising everything from real-time service health information, inferred from low-level resource event data, to digital customer service assistants. This white paper assesses the realism and viability of such approaches.

We start by defining service assurance itself and by describing the types of service assurance systems available on the market today, in terms of what questions they can answer and what kinds of data they provide. Next, taking a strictly fact-based and neutral, engineering view of the topic, we look into what may be possible with Big Data and AI and what is not realistic – in terms of cost as well as resources.

We therefore discuss what questions should be answered by service assurance systems and what kinds of data we can pull from the network as input to provide these answers. We also summarize the roles of Big Data and AI in the context of service assurance.

Finally, we introduce the missing piece in service assurance today: active testing and monitoring. Active testing and monitoring addresses the question: “Are we meeting the level of service quality we promised?” We describe how this activity complements the data landscape derived from the service assurance stack with precisely the kind of pertinent and high-quality data that is missing.

We close the white paper with a brief look at some of the relevant results from a recent NFV Service Assurance and Analytics research study and survey completed by Heavy Reading in October 2017. The findings of the survey and the industry’s views on what is needed to satisfy the fundamental goals of service assurance are discussed in relation to the research and findings of this white paper.

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Mobile Video Index report highlights trends and insights from more than 30 live deployments globally.

Analysis of live operator data conducted by mobile data traffic management solutions provider, Openwave Mobility has found that 38% of all mobile video traffic globally is now High Definition (HD) – far beyond what mobile operators had predicted.

As Communications Service Providers (CSPs) invest in becoming Digital Service Providers (DSPs), providing new digital services, digitalising their operations, and virtualising their networks, what are the major new challenges?

In an interview with analyst Mark Mortensen, Digital Experience Research Director with Analysys Mason, Jonathan Kaftzan of software giant Amdocs, discusses the current landscape, identifying the key threats and opportunities that have become apparent.

As they move increasingly into the digital space, with a range of increasingly complex new digital services bundles for both consumer and enterprise, there is unquestionably an overwhelming need for Telcos to simplify their business processes.

That said, they also have a number of inherent strengths, some currently untapped, that can be galvanized and built on, as they transform, for immediate financial and subscriber value benefits.

Take a look at the very real market opportunities already open to CSPs, how some are already realising that value and the key learning points, outlined in this recent discussion.

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The path from 4G to 5G is indirect and encompasses a range of options encapsulated under the 4.5G umbrella term for staging migration. This is enabling operators to access a tailored upgrade path by choosing products that use already available network assets but are deployed with system-ready modules that can evolve to 5G at a later stage. With this approach, the full radio capability cannot be used immediately but other parts of the system can benefit from pre-5G availability.

SophiaTX, the first open-source platform to integrate blockchain with SAP and other ERP, CRM and SCM systems, has confirmed that it’s Token Generation Event (TGE) will begin on December 5th 2017. (more…)

EXCLUSIVE REPORT– Brazil Case Study: It can be hard for telcos to collect what they’re owed at the best of times. And in recent years, says VanillaPlus’s editorial director, Jeremy Cowan, Brazil’s economic situation hasn’t been within shouting distance of the best of times. (more…)

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